A parallel block LU decomposition method for distributed finite element matrices

In this work we present a new parallel direct linear solver for matrices resulting from finite element problems. The algorithm follows the nested dissection approach, where the resulting Schur complements are also distributed in parallel. The sparsity structure of the finite element matrices is used to pre-compute an efficient block structure for the LU factors. We demonstrate the performance and the parallel scaling behavior by several test examples.

► Parallel direct linear solver for finite element matrices.
► Parallel solution for dense Schur complements.
► Pre-computation of the block sparsity pattern.
► Evaluation of the algorithm by a challenging test suite.